Fashionista Street: The Cold Gravy of Reality?

I’m chasing this story as hard as I can, but really, how fast can a blind flaneur sprint and preserve a scrap of dignity? Thanks to France 24, I’ve found a new way to follow French news. Check out the RSS feed at the bottom of the sidebar.

[AFP, Reuters]: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is believed to have married former Italian supermodel Carla Bruni at a small private ceremony held at the Elysee palace last week, a French newspaper reported Monday.

In a report posted on its website on Monday, L’Est Republicain newspaper quoted an unnamed “source close to a witness who attended the ceremony” as saying that it was a “small, very private” affair at the presidential palace.

It’s the final graphs of this story that grabbed my attention. Reminds me of the final line in a Donald Barthelme short story from the 60s, something about “the hot meat of romance smothered by the cold gravy of reality.”

Bruni may accompany Sarkozy on a state visit to India later this month, and an Indian foreign ministry official said her presence would cause “no protocol problem from our side”.

Bruni’s previous affairs with such rock stars as Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton have provided regular tabloid headlines and she was quoted in a French magazine last year as saying “Monogamy bores me terribly”.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]